Some computer-based applications that accept speech as input are associated with a grammar that describes the set of words that can be recognized by a speech recognition engine that uses the grammar for speech recognition. Restricting speech recognition to a subset of all possible words in a language by using a grammar generally improves the speech recognition performance of an application. Because such closed-grammar applications are only capable of successfully recognizing words represented in the grammar, speech corresponding to a word not in the grammar may be misrecognized as one of the words in the grammar if there is no speech recognition model included in the system to process such speech. The Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) standard specifies that a particular rule ($GARBAGE) be implemented for speech recognition applications to reduce the number of misrecognitions by out-of-grammar words.